The second part of the discussion of racism vs. extreme color arousal by Francis Holland.

But I’ve also got a different rap that I’ve been developing a book about for the past two years, and now I’ve decided to just write and post about it here in the AfroSpear/Afrosphere. I believe that Extreme Color Aroused Disorder (ECA) is a mental illness. Just as we would get no where trying to develop sociological solutions to the problem of schizophrenia without the help of psychiatrists, I believe we will not achieve the success we could fighting exteme color arousal until we insist that America acknowledge, diagnose and treat it as the mental illness that it obviously (to me) is.

Let’s see: Symptoms of Extreme Color Arousal include paranoia (the Black men are after my daughter); obsessive compulsive behaviors (separate bathrooms, redlining); hyper-vigilance (enforcement of segregation, even today in whites-only schools, movies casts and television shows); anti-social behavior and lack of empathy (genocide in Iraq, callous disregard for suffering in New Orleans); and delusions (Blacks are a separate “race). I’m sure the rest of you can come up with at least a hundred more symptoms that can be found as symptoms of other recognized mental illnesses listed in the DSM-IV.

Now, why do I call this Extreme Color Arousal (ECA) (EE-cah) instead of racism? Well, the word “racism” is based on the fallacious premise that we are from a different “race,” like dogs. Since I do not and will never accept the premise of separate and inevitably inequal “races,” I simply refuse ever again to use the fallacious and white supremacist words “race,” “racial,”, “racist,” and “racism.” Please visit plezWord and my blog and read my articles on the topic, to decide for yourselves.

I don’t need the fallacious words that are based on the premise that we are from another species, because I’ve spent the last two years developing more scientific and linguistically appropriate alternatives for myself. For example, when the police see me coming from half a mile and stop me and other blacks at a rate 2 to three times higher than whites, they are not responding to my “race.” The visual cue to which they are responding is simply my “skin-color.”

Since I know they are aroused to stop me as soon as they perceive my skin-color, I know their problem is that they have Extreme Skin-Color-Arousal. Now, something has to be going on in their heads and cognitive behavioral psycologists tell us that “something” is “thoughts” and “emotions” and these thoughts and emotions become manifest in behavior. Extreme behavior, in many cases. When thoughts and emotions manifest in extreme behavior over a period of time, that’s a “disorder.”

Let’s put those components of the problem together and see what we have descriptively: Extreme Color-Aroused Emotion, Ideation and Behavior, Disorder (ECEIBD). But if we abbreviate that to Extreme Color Arousal, everyone will eventually know what we are talking about, as long as we make reference to all of the elements that prove our case, which we should always do anyway, lest we be easily accused of imagining or exaggerating things.

When you think about it, this becomes a valid diagnosis, which is good. Because without diagnosis there can be no treatment and no cure.

I know that everyone says there can be no treatment for ECA. How do they know? Isn’t that simply a self-fulfilling and highly convenient profecy? How do we know empirically that ECA is any harder to treat than battered women’s syndrome, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Adult Children of Acoholics Families syndrome, alcoholism and drug addiction?

The simple answer is that since ECA is seen to be a disease whose victims are Black, it isn’t considered to be worth diagnosing and treating. That’s why we have to make it clear to whites that THEY are the victims of ECA as well.

The Federal Government says that, between hate crimes and discrimination complaints, about a million complaints are going through the US Government every years. Some of these complaints represent white people who will be dismissed from their jobs for discrimination, lose wages, be the subject of discrimination suits . . . Others of these complaints are white people becoming the VICTIMS of hate crimes. In both cases, it is in whites people’s best interests to have treatment for this illnesses so that they won’t get themselves into trouble by acting out extreme color-aroused emotion, ideation and behavior disorder.

White corporations are spending and inordinate amount of money defending themselves after workers commit acts of discrimination that add nothing to the bottom line. When workers “go off” and kill co-workers because they are color-aroused or have been the victims of color-aroused abuse, that too is expensive for US corporations.

If the only thing I accomplish in this lifetime is that Extreme Color-aroused Emotion Ideation and Behavior Disorder be recognized as a mental illness, so that workers can be screened for it and receive help before they kill their co-workers, be they Black or white, then I will have done something useful with my time.

Over the last couple of years, I think I have worked out conceptually a number of ways in which this screening could take place and be successful in helping employees and others to deal with this increasingly multicultural world in which we live.

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About asabagna

I go by the name of Asabagna Alatentou, "Asa" for short. I took this name as my African/Spiritual name when I went on a pilgrimage to West Africa in 1997. I visited Senegal, The Gambia and Ghana. "Asabagna" means "hunter" and I received that name during a naming ceremony when I visited a village in northern Ghana. "Alatentou" is Mandingo for "God is gracious" and I received that name from a village Griot in Senegal. I was born in England and my parents are of Jamaican heritage. I spent most of my formative years in Jamaica, but grew up primarily in Toronto Canada. I currently live in Ottawa, the national capital of Canada. I am professionally employed, married, 2 wonderful kids and regularly attend a Pentecostal church. I am a born-again Christian. I do not consider myself conservative or liberal, right-wing or left-wing, centrist etc., or any of the multiple categories that society likes to confine and define people by. However, I do have strong views, beliefs and opinions but I also consider myself open to listening and contemplating other viewpoints. I am a firm believer that "if you don't believe in something, you will fall for anything".

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How The Cow Became and Apple . . . And How the Cow Became a Cow Again: A Parable about the “R” Word

Imagine that you go to France to study veterinary medicine, with a focus on cows. On you first day, you meet a Frenchman who proposes to be your friend. When you ask him how to say “cow” in French, he tells you with utter authority and certainty that the French word for “cow is “pomme,” which actually means “apple.”
So, to prepare for your first day of classes, you diligently go to the library, search for, read and takes notes upon the subject of the your new veterinary career – apples.

Here, you begin to form your mental map of the veterinary world, based on the faulty premise supplied to you by your new “friend.”
As the premise for your new learning, in French, you write at the top of your first notepad,“The cow may be defined as: “the fleshy usually rounded red, yellow, or green edible pome fruit of a usually cultivated tree (genus Malus).“
Nothing that you study about the “cow-apple” makes any sense to you, but you assume it is due to your unfamiliarity with the French language. However, at the end of your first week, you realize the dirty trick your friend has played upon you.
Not wanting to waste a whole week of research and vocabulary learning, you continue your studies based on the premise that the French word for cow is “apple,” which is not immediately ruinous to your veterinary career, because in France your first exams come only at the very end of the first semester. Now, what will you do? Will you abandon the faulty premise and discard all of your research? Or will you keep the faulty premise and flunk your veterinary exams?
This, unfortunately, is the state of American thinking about the concepts of “race” and “racism” and “racial” and “racist” and “racial group.” “Race” does not exist. There is only one species of humans and that is the human species. In fact, there is just as much scientific evidence for the concept of race as there is for the proposition that the world is flat.
The “race” word, (which I shall refer to after his article as “the ‘R’ word”), is an intentional conceptual fallacy like that of the “cow-apple,” created by white supremacists to rationalize the enslavement of Black people by consigning African slaves to a new and inferior subspecies of the human family. The “R” word is, in fact the conceptual foundation of the white supremacist “separate and unequal” theory of American interaction between people of the Black and white color groups. “Race” is a white supremacist meme, not a concept based in observation of the natural world.
Now, just as our friend above, who studied apples instead of cows in France because of the incorrect word he was given, every single thought that we have that is based on the concept of the cow-apple of “race” will be fallacious, unscientific, unempirical. How can it be otherwise?
What white supremacists called “race” was and is really just a group of skin color, facial morphology and hair differences that constitute about 0001 % of the human genome. Our blood and organs are interchangeable because we are basically “all the same” genetically, with differences based on color being less important scientifically and medically than differences based on blood type. (Would you rather that the choice of blood for your blood transfusion be based on your blood type of your skin color, across blood types?) Someday, even our brains may be found to be interchangeable. Race was always an ideological and political concept in a hopeless search for genetic evidence to support a politically-motivated thesis. Just as science proved that the world was not flat, blood banks, and genetic science have proved that there is not more than one human race.
However, if “race” does not exist biologically, then how can any word or concept that is based on the fallacy of “race” be completely accurate, like “racial” and “racist” and “racial group”?
Sociologically, the word “race” became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with innumerable social structures built upon the concept for the illicit purpose of enforcing and normalizing the fallacious concept of “race.” But the social oppressive “separate and unequal” social structures, followed by “separate but equal Jim Crow social structures, which were succeeded by “equality of separate but equal ‘races'” – none of these could not change our genes.
Our genes were always equal and will always remain equal, in spite of the “cow-apple” premise of the white supremacist pro-slavery linguists.
If all of our premises based on the cow-apple theory are faulty – premises developed over the course of four hundred years that are now being progressively and inevitably debunked, then what words and concepts can replace those that we have always relied upon?
That is one of the fundamental topics addressed by new scholarly online journal, called the American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA). The American Journal of Color Arousal is a critical thinking journal that deconstructs the fallacious ideological and political concept of “race” and offers new empirically-based concepts to replace anachronistic and faulty old ones.
In particular, American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA) articles explore what happens in the human mind and in human society when skin-color-aroused emotions and ideation are manifested in skin-color-aroused behavior. Articles in the American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA) are never based on anachronistic and disproven science, but are based instead upon critical psychiatric and sociological observation and study of humans and human interaction in our sociological environment.
Methodologically, the American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA) studies the group of phenomena that were once referred to as “racism” but are now referred to as Extreme Color-Aroused Emotion, Ideation and Behavior Disorder (ECEIBD), which often is called Extreme Color Arousal for short. The American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA) rejects the fatalistic and unproven assumption that color-aroused emotions, ideation and behavior are beyond the control of humans and instead seeking analogies to other behavioral disorders which are successfully treated with well-known psychiatric and behavioral therapies.
At the American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA), which functions as a blog with community participation, you will find a constantly updated link list called, “Concepts in Color Arousal Theory,” including many articles discussing how to reconstruct our mental maps of the relationships between and within color groups while steadfastly rejecting and abandoning any and every reliance on the cow-apple theory.
The articles and links posted AMJCA are written by Francis L. Holland, Esq, other Afrosphere bloggers,whitosphere bloggers, published psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association, other attorneys, sociologists, anthropologists and other professionals and critical observers of the natural world.
Please feel free to contribute, but always be prepared to define and defend all of your terms empirically, because AMJCA participants will no longer passively or otherwise capitulate to the cow-apple theory.Francis L. Holland, Esq.
Editor, American Journal of Color Arousal

When I was in my first year at the Northeastern University School of Law, a white law professor and guest speaker came to address the 150 students and faculty of our Culture and Difference course. In his talk, he made the assertion “racism” could not exist in America, because the “free market” and logic would not permit it.

When he finished his speech, I raised my hand and asked, If the profit motive automatically prevents discrimination, then why did white southern restaurants refuse to sell to hundreds of thousand Black potential customers, and why do some of them continue to systematically and intentionally provide slow and poor service to Blacks who want to be customers? Don’t they lose money and market share by refusing to sell to Blacks?

The professor was stumped. His theory had been quickly and quite mercilessly refuted and debunked. My Socratic question had proven that people who are motivated by skin-color aroused emotions and ideation often behave in ways that are irrationally counter to their own financial interests. In extreme cases such as the example of the white segregationist restaurant owners and workers, their Extreme Color-Aroused Emotion, Ideation and Behavior becomes a Disorder (ECEIBD) that severely impairs their functioning in at least one key area of their lives – their business.

Now, refusal to serve Blacks and Latinos is even more dysfunctional than it was before, because in addition to losing potential income and market share, they run the risk of civil action that could impair their ability to raise capital, reduce the market value of their shares, and lead to multimillion dollar civil judgments against them, and all with no benefit to the corporate bottom line. Some color-aroused antagonistic behave is profitable for business, but a significant portion of it hurts productivity and hurts the corporate bottom line.

And so American corporations have a self-interested motive to learn more about Extreme Color-Aroused Emotion, Ideation and Behavior Disorder (ECEIBD), which is often called “Extreme Color Arousal” (ECA), for short. To the extent that they can weed our irrational and expensive color-aroused behaviors of the individual and/or the corporation that hurt corporate profits, they can become more profitable without introducing new products, without making significant new investments and without taking new risks. That’s a good deal for most businesspeople.

Even today, what would happen to the bottom line of McDonald’s and Burger King if they suddenly implemented a national policy of not serving Blacks? Wouldn’t their potential client based shrink by something akin to their present margin of profitability? When not motivated by a mental disorder, don’t business people normally try to increase their market share rather than reduce it? How much money are American corporations losing because of irrational decisions to indiscriminately discriminate against potential customers?